Is AI Overrated?

This can be a controversial post, but I will still go ahead and share my thoughts.

#AI is not new today, it has been existing since the days of any online word document started highlighting spelling mistakes as you write. The next generation AI tools like Grammerly started showing you sentence construction mistakes and grammatical corrections. Most of the book writing softwares also help you with the same.

As times progressed, auto corrections started coming up in most of the technology we use, for instance when you misspel a place name on Google Maps, it automatically asks “Did you mean this?” or in when you do a Google search, and it does not for the exact match, it asks you “Did you mean this?”.

Even in photographic works, smart corrections for adjusting light, brightness etc have always existed since a long time.

So why suddenly all this AI powered advertisements?

Come 2023, Microsoft invested $10 Billion in OpenAI, founded in 2015 by Elon Musk and Sam Altman. This is when s*** hits the fan. All the world is going ga-ga about the game changing AI and how people are going to loose jobs. What happened between 2015-2022 or even before the launch all the work being done to make ChatGPT? 

I call this marketing. If you notice, almost every year since the 70’s there is something new which was coming along and the next few years will be centred around that term. Lets look at a timeline:

1944 – Neural Network

1965 – Expert System

1970 – Fault tolerant

1976 – Ethernet

1977 – Intranet

1979 – Logout

1980 – TCP / IP

1981 – LAN

1982 – Domain Name

1983 – Virtual Private Network, WAN

1984 – VPN

1985 – IP Address & C++

1986 – Internet

1987 – Virtual reality, JIF

1988 – Hyperlink, JPEG / MPEG

1989 – Cybersecurity

1990 – Internet Service Provider

1991 – Cybercrime

1992 – URL, Augmented Reality, PDF,

1993 – Website

1994 – Cyberterrorism

1995 – Livestream

1996 – Cloud Computing

1998 – Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)

1999 – Blog

2001 – Internet of Things (IoT)

2002 – Vlog

2005 – Ransomwear, Microblogging

2007 – Netbook

2009 – Cryptocurrency

2011 – Blockchain

2016 – Machine Learning (ML)

2023 – Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Notice, its something what has been existing, but someone using a name to make it fad.

If you notice carefully, Apple never uses the word AI in any of its products or conversations? Why? Because they want something of their own, Machine Learning. ML has been doing the rounds for the last few years, but never gained so much attention like the AI. What is the difference?

AI is mainly concerned with utilising stored information to make it easier for you to accomplish tasks based on how you use that information. On the other hand, ML focuses on enabling systems to behave automatically even before receiving input.

All AI powered tools work in the similar fashion. After you give an input, they suggest you how you can better it. For instance, I am using Notion as my primary source of all writings and it does not automatically suggest anything, after i write, I can select the sentence and then ask AI to improve it.

So, do you think AI is overrated? I feel overrated is not the right word to use at all. No one will loose jobs, nothing will happen. It will become part of our daily use like how documentation software suggests you to correct a spelling or improve your writing style. And with regards to loosing jobs, the same was said when computers started taking over, did people loose jobs or adopt? The same will apply here.

What do you think?